6 years ago, the lives of me and those of a lot of the people – strangers and kin alike – changed. When I think of everything that has happened since that day, what really stands out is how I can see myself for who I was, with the distance that a bit of age has provided. I see myself and all of us who were involved, as being so very young, something that I appreciate because these days, I enjoy the fruits of how I have matured. With that concept of youth, I also see my naivety, courage, desperation, agency and powerlessness. As I process these thoughts out loud, a most beloved friend helps me notice how my perceptions of/ thoughts on age resurface constantly in how I see and speak about the past and the present. It is striking.
As I reflect on the past 6 years and beyond, a sentence floats in and out of my head. It is one I heard in a interview series I like watching: “She was innocent all along”. The speaker says these words to describe her mother, as she reflects on the difficulty of their relationship. It is a contemplation that seems, like much of mine, enabled by age.
We were innocent all along.
With Yolanda Dyantyi’s court cases being the most prominent of the repercussions of #RUReferenceList, I think about how she has been criminalized by Rhodes. And due to the intimacy I know a lot of us have with #RUReferenceList as an event, as she fought the university, I have often seen her as a representation of all of us. I have read a lot of the statements Rhodes has written about her and her case and thought about how strongly they ephasise criminality, their most recent conjuring being something about the need to protect society from “the reign of the law of the jungle” (???! Bathong !???). In their narrative, Yolanda, and by extension, all of us who were in solidarity in those fateful moments, are never innocent.
To be innocent in the eyes of the university/any colonial institution – to be worthy of being spared of the kind of cruel retribution the expelled students faced – is not possible for us. It is not possible precisely because the roots of colonialism in that and many other institutions are strong and in such places, the definition of innocence is distorted for the sake of holding onto power.
We – angry, hurting, black, queer, fallist, woman, non-binary, femme – could never have been innocent in a place like that. We stood against rape, which, as Prof. Pumla Gqola has outlined, is a founding element of colonial conquest and colonial order. But even outside of what we stood against, the presence of our bodies was always a stain against the backdrop of what institutions like universities were originally set out to be. That we were there had never meant that we were accepted. We knew or would come to know that our presence was merely tolerated. We were there because of concessions made, concessions of power forced through decades of resistance that eventually made it impossible to claim legitimacy in the political order without letting us in.
#RUReferenceList is one of the most messy things I have ever witnessed. There are no easy answers to anything. And yet, today I reclaim our innocence as ours, as valid and as everpresent.
When I say we were innocent , I mean it not in the sense that everything that happened was permissible and justified and unquestionable. Rather, I mean that, those of us who have been scrutinized for our actions, faced the weight of accusations of criminality and causing harm, had our lives upended radically or have been changed by witnessing all of this happen to those we care for, never deserved this.
We are innocent in that we never deserved to have to grapple with the questions we’ve had to grapple with. To have to fight the things we fought against. To have had to fight for the things we fought for. To have lost sleep over any of this (losing sleep being maybe the most miniscule of what was lost).
We never should have been violated. And then had to fight for our violations to be recognized as such. And then been dismissed and invalidated and retaliated against. All of that never should have happened. And within that, the people who drove much of this cruelty, those who in comparison had very little to lose, have not had their ‘innocence’ and their neutrality and their intent questioned enough. The press releases, disciplinary hearings and other manners of inquiry into our innocence/blameworthiness should have rather been turned inward by the custodians of the place we questioned. They should have been (and should still be) asked, until they answer and account, why what happened happened. They should bear the brunt of the heaviest questions and questioning that came out of #Chapter212 and #RUReferenceList.
We were innocent all along.
gorata chengeta 